How Joe Biden finds common ground with ‘defund the police’ campaigners

‘Alternative forms of crime prevention’ are on the agenda

Biden announces his 2022-2023 US budget proposal (EPA)

Earlier this month, President Joe Biden said that the solution to crime was not to defund the police but rather to “fund the police”. That angered the progressive wing of his party, particularly representatives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Cori Bush; nonetheless, his budget announcement yesterday followed through, proposing $3.2 billion in discretionary resources for state and local grants to – in the White House’s words – put more cops on the beat. It also includes $30bn in mandatory resources for community policing.

Plenty of political observers have also noted how the slogan “defund the police” likely alienated Latino voters, who will be critical to whomever wins the majority in 2020 and with whom Republicans have made significant gains. Republicans have used the slogan as a cudgel to beat Democrats with as they campaign to win back the majority.

When negotiations on police reform with Democratic Representative Karen Bass and Senator Cory Booker failed, Republican Senator Tim Scott pinned the blame on Democratic attempts to defund the police. That’s an account that Booker disputes. But it should be noted that Booker rarely likes to say a bad word about any of his colleagues, Republican or Democrat, and he praised Scott, who is also Black, in his defense of Ketanji Brown Jackson last week.

While Biden’s budget beefs up spending for police, he hasn’t entirely broken with people on the “defund” side of the debate. As plenty of them have long demanded, he supports shifting resources around from law enforcement toward mental health and social work. The Washington Post’s Cleve Wootson asked about “alternative forms of crime prevention – not just defunding the police, but crime reduction in communities” at Biden’s news conference.

In response, Biden said that there should be a “significant amount” of those alternatives; he specifically said police departments “need psychologists in the department as much as they need extra rifles” and that “they need social workers engaged with them”. It’s unlikely that the president and the Squad will come to any agreement about police funding, but they might at least find some common ground here.